You Look Different in Real Life

my legs a lot and stare up at the sky, squinting into the sun and scratching my behind way too much.
    In Five at Eleven there’s a scene where I’m standing in front of a full-length mirror with a guitar strapped on, playing chords and talking at the same time.
    Who the hell was that kid? Didn’t she know how it would all look?
    Of course, it looked fine. It looked fantastic, actually. But now it seems impossible that I could re-create that fantasticness.
    Whether I can or not, here is Leslie nodding at me, then at Lance, and then I know he’s recording and I’m looking down to pet the cat, imaging how the shot must look on the camera’s little LCD display.
    “Justine,” says Leslie. Her voice catches and sounds froggy. She clears it and tries again. “Tell me about a typical day for you.”
    “A typical day for me would be . . .” I pause, glad I remembered to start it off like that, so it will sound better when edited. “I get up. I go to school. After school I come home, or go to my dad’s, or walk around Main Street, or hang out at Muddy Joe’s with Felix.” What else do I do? “I go online or watch movies in my room. Homework, of course.” Wow. In other words, a typical day for me is a staggeringly boring pile of crap.
    Leslie pauses, glancing at her notebook. I can’t read her face. “Are you doing any afterschool activities?”
    “Not at the moment.”
    “I thought you played guitar.” She’s tried to frame that softly, curious and floating, but it still hits hard.
    An image jump-cuts into my head. I’m thirteen, seated on a small stage in a church basement without windows, sweating and suffocating from heat and all-over panic. I’m holding a guitar. There are dozens of faces fixed on me, including my parents and sister in a back row. I’m playing “Scarborough Fair” and although I’ve been practicing this song for weeks and I know the chords by heart, my fingers aren’t doing what they’re supposed to. My voice is soft and scratchy, and the ages-old air inside the church seems to be swallowing it up. I’d been taking guitar lessons for two years, and therewere seven-year-olds at the music school who played circles around me.
    “Practice makes better,” my dad said to me afterward. “Keep it up and by next year, you’ll sound amazing.”
    But it wasn’t that I sounded awful. It was that I didn’t like it. My guitar gave me no joy. The thing with strings didn’t call to me from its closed case in the corner while I played video games or trudged through homework. So after that total fail of a recital, I’d stopped taking lessons and never played again.
    “Justine?” says Leslie.
    I’ve been spacing out, staring blankly at the wall behind Leslie’s head. On camera.
    “Any hobbies you want to tell us about?” asks Leslie. Her brow is crinkled with a careful, pleasant interest.
    But I’ve got nada. I give a Nada Shrug. Leslie glances at her notebook.
    “So what about guys? Do you have a boyfriend?”
    Now I snort. Involuntary reflex.
    “Negative.” The only truth I will give them. There’s no way they can know about Ian.
    “Okay,” she says. “Should we try something else?”
    I nod.
    “I hear you’re not friends with Rory anymore. What happened there?”
    I look at her accusingly. Try something else was supposed to mean a softie question about school orwhat music I like to listen to.
    “We grew apart.”
    “Full sentence?”
    “Rory and I grew apart, I guess.” Pull this one together, wise-ass. “Don’t look so shocked. Are you still friends with the people you played with when you were little?”
    “That’s different. You and Rory . . . you seemed special. I remember when her mother called me a few years ago to tell me about the diagnosis. I thought, well, at least she’s got Justine. You two had been friends since you were babies.”
    Now I’m angry. I don’t remember Leslie making judgments like this, but I guess after ten years she’s invested.
    “Our moms had been friends since we were babies.”
    “Did something happen in particular? Did she do something?”
    I don’t answer. I let the silence hang there. An image of Rory comes back to me, from five years ago.
    I’m glad you want to go to this movie with me, Justine. I like having popcorn but I can’t eat a whole one and now we can share.
    We were eleven and it was a month before Lance and Leslie were coming to start shooting the second film.
    “Make an effort with Rory,” my mother